Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Review — It’s Cheap, But What Else?

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Nutricost is a Utah-based supplement company, and as the name suggests, they specialize in cheaper supplements — their slogan is “Quality Supplements and Vitamins for Less.” They offer a really wide variety of products including everything from your standard vitamins and minerals to more niche products like ketogenic diet support and spinach powder.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Ingredients

Nutricost’s Creatine is unflavored and it only has one ingredient, so there’s not a whole lot to say as far as the contents go. That ingredient, of course, is creatine, specifically creatine monohydrate. That’s easily the most widely used and widely studied form of the supplement.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Benefits & Effectiveness

Creatine is a nitrogenous organic acid that’s present in most animal tissues and is particularly high in beef. Still, you need to consume a kilogram of beef to get 5 grams of creatine, so supplementing can be a good idea. One or two daily teaspoons of creatine is linked to improved power output, larger muscles, and a healthier brain.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Ingredients

How does Nutricost’s creatine measure up? For starters it only contains creatine, so there are no artificial ingredients or sweeteners. That also means there are no extras like high-glycemic carbs, which may help drive creatine to the muscles more quickly, or branched chain amino acids, which can be useful pre-workout. If you prefer your creatine with a little something extra, this isn’t for you.

It’s also micronized, which means it disperses more easily in water than your standard creatine monohydrate. (It also means it’s fluffier in texture.) This can be pretty useful for folks who take their time sipping their supplements and don’t like piles of powder settling at the bottom of the shaker.

One thing that may put off some users is that there aren’t really many certifications on this product. For instance, some creatine supplements are certified Good Manufacturing Practices, though Nutricost’s isn’t. A lot of creatines get third party tested for banned substances, this doesn’t. It’s non-GMO and gluten-free but beyond that there’s not a ton of testing done on it. For some athletes, this may not reach the level of quality control that they’re used to.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Price

This is $12.30 for 100 servings. That’s 12.3 cents per serving or 2.46 cents per gram, which is very cheap. Until now, the cheapest creatine I’d ever seen was MuscleTech’s Platinum Creatine at 2.8 cents per gram, but Nutricost has them beat.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Review

The Takeaway

It’s a super, super basic creatine and what you see is what you get. There are no fillers but there are no extras. It’s also extremely cheap. It mixes well but it’s unflavored. If you’re looking for the most basic creatine product on the market, this may just fit the bill.

Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate

Per Serving: $0.12

8.6

Ingredients

7.5/10

Effectiveness

8.0/10

Price

10.0/10

Mixability

9.0/10

Pros

Extremely inexpensive

Micronized

Comes with a scoop

Cons

Nick is a content producer and journalist with over seven years’ experience reporting on four continents. His first articles about health were on a cholera outbreak in rural Kenya while he was reporting for a French humanitarian organization. His next writing job was covering the nightlife scene in Shanghai. He’s written on a lot of things.

After Shanghai, he went on to produce a radio documentary about bodybuilding in Australia before finishing his Master’s degrees in Journalism and International Relations and heading to New York City. Here, he’s been writing on health full time for more than five years for outlets like BarBend, Men's Health, VICE, and Popular Science.

No fan of writing in the third person, Nick’s passion for health stems from an interest in self improvement: How do we reach our potential?

Questions like these took him through a lot of different areas of health and fitness like gymnastics, vegetarianism, kettlebell training, fasting, CrossFit, Paleo, and so on, until he realized (or decided) that strength training fit best with the ideas of continuous, measurable self improvement.

At BarBend his writing focuses a little more on nutrition and long-form content with a heaping dose of strength training. His underlying belief is in the middle path: you don’t have to count every calorie and complete every workout in order to benefit from a healthy lifestyle and a stronger body. Plus, big traps are cool.

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